Important note about the ongoing European RFCS SAFEBRICTILE project – "Standardization of safety assessment procedures across brittle to ductile failure modes"

INVESTIGATION ON THE PARTIAL SAFETY FACTOR γM

ECCS recommends to provide as many data as possible in order to help the project to reach important conclusions, and to determine a proper value of γM1.

Introduction to the SAFEBRICTILE project

Currently, safety assessment is not consistently considered throughout the many parts of Eurocode 3, mainly due to a lack of guidance and lack of existing databanks containing information on the distribution of the relevant basic variables and steel properties. Therefore, in SAFEBRICTILE an objective and consistent assessment procedure for the safety assessment of the various failure modes that are relevant for steel structures is developed. The unified procedure will result in codified procedures for inclusion in the structural Eurocodes and is able to cover ductile failure modes (driven by plasticity), semi-ductile failure modes (driven by stability) and brittle failure modes (driven by fracture). In addition, several rules in Eurocode 3 covering the failure modes treated in the project are reassessed in order to fulfil the developed safety assessment procedures. The results of this project will lead to major competitiveness gains: (1) faster time cycle in the development of new design procedures able to cope with innovation; (2) increased reliability in the accuracy of new design models; (3) major savings in R&D costs by avoidance of major duplication of work.